Painted Desert (Arizona)

The Painted Desert is a desert area on the Colorado Plateau in the U.S. state of Arizona. It is about 1800 meters above sea level and extends through an arc of about 250 km in length on the north bank of the Little Colorado River between the East of the Grand Canyon in the Coconino County on Navajo County to the Apache County. In the West, it starts between the Little Colorado River and the Echo Cliffs, in the east it ends at the southern end of the Defiance Plateau, the valley of Black Creek.

In the strict sense are only the Painted Desert badlands, which are characterized by highly weathered round tops of many stratified rocks. They are composed of the Chinle Formation, a rock association from the Upper Triassic ( Keuper ), which was deposited in front of about 228-201 million years ago and also open to other points of the Colorado Plateau is ( Zion National Park, Canyonlands National Park ). It is composed of conglomerates, sandstones, shales, siltstones, clays and volcanic ash. The wide range of colors - mainly reds and yellows, but also white and dark layers are present - led already in 1540 the first Spanish explorers to designate the area as El Desierto Pintado. 1864 declared John Strong Newberry, the transmission of the Spanish name into English as today's official name.

The southwest part of the Navajo Indian Reservation is part of the Painted Desert as well as the northern part of the Petrified Forest National Park. Like its visitor center he also bears the name Painted Desert. There is also the Painted Desert Inn, a hotel / rest house built in the 1930s in typical region adobe style, in 1987 designated as a National Historic Landmark and serves as a museum of the National Park since a renovation in 2006.